Knockin' On Mine

Last Saturday was the first day of Conservatory Two with Michael Gellman.  

When you mention to Second City veterans that you are taking a class with “Gellman,” they give you a knowing look.  The sort of look that suggest: “he’s a hard ass, fasten your seatbelt.”  Well, he started us off with a game of freeze tag.  I felt rusty.  As a group, we must have looked rusty, because Gellman asked us if we had “last fucking improvved six fucking months ago.”  And, so, it begins. 

Our freeze tag had more than one moment of awkward-man on woman action.  So much so that Gellman admonished the menfolk to not be afraid of women. He called us nerds.  He accused us of jerking off in our basements to Spy vs. Spy from Mad Magazine.  (What? I need to re-visit that because I never got a boner from Spy vs. Spy.) He also told us that not every scene needs to end with "fucking or sucking. I know that's what Tim O'Malley taught you, but ...."  

Gellman then asked us about interactions that we had with actual people in the past week. Many of these involved alcohol, including my story.  Oh well, we’re drunken clichés.

After that, we were drilled on why we are here.  We’re here to hone our skills to see if we have the chops to be actors for the Second City.  The purpose of the Conservatory’s first two levels is to distill what we’ve learnt in Levels A through E and to see if we’ve retained those lessons.  The acid test to see if retained these lessons is the audition at the end of Conservatory 2. 

To that end, we were reminded of dialogue guidelines in improv: (1) make statements; (2) yes, and; (3) stay in the fucking present.  And, incidentally, in a Second City scene, the audience should see a change in the character. 

We were also given some guidelines for the coming weeks.  (1) No gender-bending (i.e. men playing women and vice versa).  The reason is that the audience cannot suspend its disbelief at the gender-bend.  (2) Keep your bodily fluids inside you.  Not sure what that means. I’ll take it under advisement. (3) No sounds effects.  That one, even can I understand.

At that point, we given a history of improv.  Sorry, my notes for this segment of class are incoherent, but it boils down to this: our tradition began with kids saying “fuck you” to the grown ups. 

Before we got back into scene work, we were given some pointers.  Anger.  It ends a scene with argument or confrontation.  Fearful is better than angry.  We need to find out what’s underlying the anger, deal with it, and make a better scene as a result.

Fighting.  You have to build up to fight to get the audience on your side: you get pushed three times before you’ve had enough.  If you get pushed three times, then the audience thinks that it’s justifiable for you to snap.

Action.  Don’t stop the action on stage.  Your mind works better when you’re moving, and action is like putting another log on the fire – which is another way of saying “yes, and” to the scene. 

Well, off to have some real life experiences that do not involve alcohol.